92 Comments

Recently on Faux News we learned that public education was all a liberal indoctrination scheme, even Algebra! This is simply the most recent assault on public education as progressive brainwashing The heart of the hard right counterattack has been the effort to destroy public education in favor of a "free market'/private model. One of the prongs in this offensive has been the whole high stakes testing scheme and the powerful corporate sector that has both serviced it and spent millions of dollars advocating for it. That's the topic of this posting.

I have gently chided by some that the last posting was a bit daunting in length. I would reply that the topic required it, but I get the point.

Here is the short story:

In 1995 Sandy Kress convinced Texas Legislators that the lagging achievements of minority students could be improved by a new "accountability regime using standardized testing.

When George went national , Kress got to push his plan as a panacea for pubic education on all the states. No Child Left Behind was born. From its inception it probably should have been called No Child Left Untested.

This grand experiment finally died in 2007, with only Sandy Kress left to mourn its demise . But he had little to gripe about, this law had made him a very rich man. . He became the chief lobbyist for Pearson Publishing which provided everything NCLB - from texts to tests to teacher and student prep materials over the life of the legislation.(By 2012 Pearson's annual North American gross income was $4,179,240,000,up form a mere $600 million or so in the early days.)

By 2007 the damage had been done:

Texas Backs Away From No Child Left Behind Law, Its Own Bush-Endorsed Creation

"NCLB's reauthorization in a timely manner has created an obsolete system that does not adequately reflect the accomplishments of the state's schools," the state's education chief Michael Williams wrote in an open letter Thursday. By the law's definition, in Texas 47.8 percent of schools -- and 27.6 percent of its school districts -- made "adequate yearly progress" this year.

The road to this disaster is the story of how blind faith that "market forces" and privatization are the cure for everything.

Education Inc. - How private companies are profiting from Texas public schools.

How private companies are profiting from Texas public schools.

But when the company-like many for-profits-wants to get its way in education policy, Pearson isn't shy about deploying high-powered lobbyists. Pearson pays six lobbyists to advocate for the company's legislative agenda at the Texas Capitol-often successfully. This legislative session [2006] , lawmakers cut an unprecedented $5 billion from public education, including funding for a variety of programs to help struggling students improve their performance on state tests. Despite the cuts, Pearson's funding streams remain largely intact. Bills that would have reduced the state's reliance on tests didn't pass. The Texas Senate refused to pass any bills that would have diminished the role of testing, a stance some Capitol sources attribute to Pearson's lobbying, while others give the credit to pressure from reform advocates.

Who's responsible may not matter. The interests of corporate lobbyists and reform advocates are often the same. It's difficult to separate the businessmen from the believers.

In a narrow sense, Pearson's lobbying efforts simply reflect a company protecting its profits. But in a wider view, Pearson is part of a larger education-reform effort that seeks to improve public education through free-market principles. Often that means non-traditional educational approaches like charter schools and online learning. The movement includes a lot of earnest folks, eager to improve public schools and do what's best for kids. But their efforts have earned a fortune for companies like Pearson. It's become difficult to determine where the educating ends and the profit-making begins.

10 FACTS ABOUT HIGH STAKES TESTS
ELEMENTARY SCHOOL CHILDREN ARE SPENDING EVER-INCREASING AMOUNTS OF TIME TAKING STANDARDIZED TESTS.

The 3rd, 4th and 5th grade tests are almost doubling in length this year. Last year, students in these grades spent a total of 250 minutes, over 5 days, taking their ELA and math tests. That is 50 minutes a day, on average. This year, students will spend a total of 540 minutes over 6 days taking those tests. That is 90 minutes a day, on average. For some students with IEP’s, those times will be doubled, meaning that they will spend 3 hours each day, for 6 days, taking tests.[1]

YOUR CHILDREN ARE BEING PUT TO WORK FOR THE PROFIT OF A LARGE CORPORATION.

One reason for the astonishing increase in the amount of time is that NCS Pearson, the for-profit company developing the tests, has embedded “field test questions” in the tests. They are not used to score students – they are being “tested out” to see if they can be used in future tests. In other words, your children are providing a free service for NCS Pearson, a company worth billions of dollars.

The Department of Education has not requested that parents consent to their children being used as research subjects for a for-profit corporation.

TESTING IS BIG BUSINESS.

The Texas State Commissioner of Education, Robert Scott, called “the assessment and accountability regime” not only “a cottage industry but a military-industrial complex.” NCS Pearson, the company developing the tests, is being paid more than $32 million over 5 years, to develop just the Math and ELA exams for New York State. NCS Pearson made close to $800 million in 2011 from its North American Education division.[2]

THE INCREASED TESTING TIME THIS YEAR IS JUST THE BEGINNING. THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION IS PLANNING TO GIVE MORE STUDENTS MORE TESTS IN THE FUTURE.

The city is currently developing tests for all grades, K-8. In 2014, the plan is to give as many as NINE different standardized tests a year – 5 in English, 4 in math.

THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION HAS STRUCTURED SCHOOL REPORT CARDS TO PRESSURE SCHOOLS TO FOCUS ON STUDENT TEST SCORES TO THE EXCLUSION OF OTHER FORMS OF ASSESSMENT.

The Department’s policies make a focus on test-prep inevitable, since they place such a huge emphasis on the test scores: 85% of a school’s report card grade is based upon its test scores.[3]

NEW YORK CITY’S EMPHASIS ON HIGH STAKES TESTING HAS INCREASED RACIAL AND ECONOMIC DISPARITIES IN ACCESS TO EDUCATION.

In 2008, the Bloomberg administration began using a blunt cut score to determine admission to gifted and talented programs, instead of the previous standard, which included teacher recommendations and other measures of performance. Within a year, the number of students from the poorest districts in the city who were admitted dropped from 20.2% to 14.6%. In 2011, the number of black students admitted was 11%, an all time low.

THE RECENTLY RELEASED NYC TEACHER DATA REPORTS WERE, BY THE ADMISSION OF THE NYC DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION ITSELF, HIGHLY UNRELIABLE. AND YET, THE CITY AND STATE ARE ABOUT TO INSTITUTE A SYSTEM RELYING ON THE SAME TYPE OF DATA TO EVALUATE TEACHERS – WITH HIGH-STAKES OUTCOMES, INCLUDING LOSS OF TEACHERS’ JOBS – IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS ACROSS THE STATE.

Teacher Data Reports had a 35-53% margin of error. In other words, a teacher who received a score of 50 out of 100 (“effective”) might have actually been a 25 (ineffective) or 75 (highly effective). If your doctor told you his scale was off by 30 lbs (in either direction), would you follow his advice to go on a diet? Would you trust a doctor who used such a scale?

STATES WHERE HIGH-STAKES TESTING WERE IMPLEMENTED EARLY AND AGGRESSIVELY ARE NOW SEEING A BACKLASH AGAINST THEM AS THE REPERCUSSIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING BECOME CLEAR.

Texas was the first state to used high stakes testing on a massive scale, and served as the model for the national “No Child Left Behind Act”, which required all states to institute high stakes testing. Texas is now experiencing a major backlash against it across the state. The state education commissioner, Robert Scott, said the mentality that standardized testing is the “end-all, be-all” is a “perversion” of what a quality education should be. And more than 100 local Texas school boards have passed a resolution calling for an end to the overuse of standardized testing in the state.[4]

In its 2011 report to Congress, the National Academy of Sciences committee that Congress commissioned to review the nature and implications of America’s test-based accountability systems concluded, “There are little to no positive effects of these systems overall on student learning and educational progress, and there is widespread teaching to the test and gaming of the systems that reflects a wasteful use of resources and leads to inaccurate or inflated measures of performance.”[5]

LOW STAKES STANDARDIZED TESTS EXIST AND HAVE BEEN IN PLACE FOR A LONG TIME. THESE TESTS ARE ONES THAT EDUCATIONAL EXPERTS HAVE FOUND TO BE VALID AND RELIABLE, AND ARE USED ONLY FOR THE PURPOSES FOR WHICH THEY WERE INTENDED.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a standardized test administered by the federal government to a random sampling of students from around the nation. Because the scores are completely confidential (it is illegal to identify a student who took the test) and because it does not report scores by school, but only by state and district, the NAEP scores are considered the “gold standard” of test scores. There is no incentive to cheat or prepare for the NAEP tests, because there are no direct consequences attached to performance on it. In other words, it is NOT a high stakes test, and so scores on it reflect the actual state of learning of those who took it, not whether they spent the last six weeks prepping for it.

[1] Source: New York State Education Department, Memorandum from Ken Slentz, Deputy Commissioner, NYSED, December 2011

THE ABC’S OF NYS TESTING: PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE
PART I – TESTING IN THE PAST:

Until 1995, there was almost no high stakes testing in New York State. To graduate from high school, students needed to pass “Regents Competency Tests” (RCTs), but they presented no difficulty for anyone who finished four years of high school.

Beginning in 1995, the Board of Regents changed the graduation policy, phasing in five Regents Exams as requirements for graduation. These exams were and are much harder than the RCTs; they are extremely content-intensive and effectively dictate curriculum for high school classes. As for elementary and middle school, before 2003, the only high stakes tests that kids took occurred in 4th grade (for placement into middle schools) and in 8th grade (for placement into high schools). There were no exams required for promotion to the next grade nor were schools “graded” based upon test scores until Mayor Bloomberg made those evaluations a component of his education policy in 2003.

PART II – TESTING TODAY:

Since 2003, students in grades 3-8 have taken exams in April – usually over the course of 6 days. Last year, the amount of total time for the tests jumped up dramatically. In 2011, third graders took 250 minutes of tests; in 2012, they sat for 540 minutes – 90 minutes a day for 6 days. For 3rd graders with IEPs granting double time accommodations, that became three hours a day for 6 days. In other words, some 8 year olds with IEPs were required to take an SAT a day for 6 days in April. These tests are “high stakes” in that several important decisions are made based upon them: for students, promotion to the next grade depends upon their scores; for teachers, whether or not they will be rehired depends upon the scores of their students; and for schools (read principals), 85% of the “grade” the school receives is determined by the scores of its students.

PART III – TESTING GOING FORWARD:

There is a great deal of mystery, uncertainty, and confusion about how much testing there will be in the future, but all indications suggest there will be more – much more. Starting this year (2012-13), the tests for grades 3-8 will be aligned with the new “Common Core” curriculum. The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), a group of states (and Washington, D.C) working together to develop the Common Core Curriculum and assessments for it, is planning to have assessments beginning in pre-school (yes, you read that right) and going through grade 12.

In addition to the end of year assessments (like what exists now – the April tests), PARCC calls for interim testing, as well. There are already plans in place to have interim testing in NYC schools by 2014 – five in English, 4 in Math – every year, starting in 3rd grade (and maybe earlier). In other words, there will be an exam a month, as well as end-of-year tests.

If it seems like test preparation is dominating the curriculum now, just wait.

ONE FINAL POINT WORTH NOTING:

In the past, all of the tests have been made public. Under the current contract with Pearson, the tests are to be kept absolutely secret, so that the public has no way to decide whether the questions on the tests are fair. We are left to rely on leaks, as during Pineapplegate, to see any of the questions.

Yes, I am in China, and thanks for the interesting links. There is, however, an economic downturn here, most notably in the past couple years. While the economic stimulus has been helpful, the development over the past decades has been too dependent on trade with collapsing western economies.

A solution to this would be reciprocal trade between China and the US, for example. There is much that China, and other developing economies, would like to obtain from the US in terms of high technology infrastructural goods.

The US could sell these to China to help balance its trade deficit. Such goods could be provided to all the developing countries on credit, provided by a US national bank. As the goods were installed in the developing economies, they would generate revenue, which could be used in part to pay off the US credit, creating millions of high paying US jobs.

It sad that the concept of a national bank has been so obscured in the US, when it has been so much a part of our national heritage:

"In sum, (Alexander) Hamilton argued that a national bank, tied intimately to the government's national debt, would help cement together the nation, and serve as the nursery for national wealth.

It is seldom understood how this concept differs from that of national banking in the countries of Europe, especially Great Britain's Bank of England, but the difference, as at least one prominent writer on Hamilton, Prof. Forrest McDonald,[2] understands, is profound. For, whereas the Bank of England—which has certain superficial similarities to what Hamilton proposed—functions to provide funds to (and control) the government, Hamilton's Bank of the United States was explicitly, and actually, devoted to providing capital for the industrial and agricultural growth of the nation, including by providing funds for the infrastructure development required for that growth.

Hamilton, like Leibniz and Colbert before him, understood the necessity for the nation to ensure investment in technological progress, for the sake of the welfare of its population, the real source of wealth. The Public Good was the aim of Public Credit."

Go to a search engine and type in "failing education system" and you'll see quite a few websites that express disagreement with that. Here's an example from the first site I found listed:

"While critics tend to rely on the three-decades long decline of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) to document the dumbing down of American education, more alarming is our performance against the students of other industrialized countries. By virtually every measure of achievement, American students lag far behind their counterparts in both Asia and Europe, especially in math and science. Moreover, the evidence suggests that they are falling farther and farther behind. As educational researcher Harold Stevenson notes, although "the U.S. is among the countries expending the highest proportion of their gross national product on education, our elementary school and secondary school students never place above the median in comparative studies of academic achievement."

I know this is a religious site, but it was just the first one listed in the search engine ranking.

To give one example, I teach English to kids here in China, and hear a lot about their school work. All kids here study something like six years of physics by the time they graduate from high school. When these kids go to America for a year as exchange students, their level of education in sciences is generally much higher that that of US kids.

This is important, because scientific advancement is what contributes most to economic development. The Chinese had fallen behind for quite some time, but their doing their best now to catch up and take the lead.

So you think its not a problem that US students have fallen behind European and Asian students in sciences? Not that the competition is important, just that we're not giving our future citizens the foundation that they need.

Do you think there is no economic crisis as well? For me, the two are related.

We do have a slow-motion train wreck going on in a part of our educational system. You may have been very fortunate to associate yourself with the better part.

We have very disjointed educational systems so part of it excels and part of it really sucks. The college/university educational system is mostly doing just fine with some part actually being the very best.

Our K-12 educational system varies widely from school district to district (correlating with socioeconomic status and ideological bent) but overall it is disgraceful, ironic, and embarrassing for what some have called the "richest country on Earth," "leader of the free world," and "superpower." Although I find these terms exaggerating, I still feel ill about "richest for what?" "leader of the factory-trained blind?" and "superpower of incompetence and burned and unburned natural gas."

I apologize that I had thought that our college/university educational system was mostly doing just fine. I had blinders on and was ONLY thinking of the quality of the education that one can get from them and forgetting about the high costs (unfortunately the government subsidies had been whittled down for decades already).

I suppose that the old adage about the fastest ways to riches may now have a broken leg: inheritance, marriage, and education. Inheritance is not easily controllable but do you know any sickly or elderly relative who may need help? It may sound crass but sickly or elderly relatives do often need help near their end-of-life (there are children of theirs who are far-flung in our highly mobile society who will experience hardship if they have to interrupt their own family lives to take care of someone else). Can you somehow "cash in" your education by marrying into money? Marriage may be possible but not easily if you do not have a job. Can you create a job for yourself using your education? Do you have any assets? Can you borrow against them with lower interest rates than your student debts? Maybe you can reduce your cost of living by moving in with someone, perhaps an elderly or sickly relative who needs care or a buddy.

Not borrowing is a good idea if you want to play it safe and sure but it can be a long hard slog. There are many different types of debts and many rich people get rich on borrowed money. In the U.S. for every dollar of net equity in the asset owned, there are three dollars of debt in the asset owned. I hear people saying that the U.S. is the "richest country in the world." Well, maybe, the U.S. certainly controls a huge amount of assets but only one quarter of the value of the assets is really owned outright. Hence, the U.S. absolutely qualifies for being the most indebted country in the world.

Borrowing is the "American way of life" and it can align you with the interest of the powers that be -- over time, borrowed money will essentially become your money and far more, if you know how to manage the debts. Student debts are much worse now than before because they can no longer be discharged through bankruptcy. If you do not want to borrow, you can sell any assets outright. You need to keep in mind that bankers hate people who neither borrow nor pay back so they will try to make life hard. They like better the people who borrow and do not pay back once in a while. They truly love the people who borrow AND pay back and make these people's lives easy.

People say that we need to dump more money into schools for the "good of the children". If the failure rate is because of "not enough money" then why are foreigners who go to our schools outperforming.

America has no family values left, we believe that people should work 6 jobs to make ends meet, we believe in artificially inflated commodities and markets where prices never come down even when paychecks never come up. We believe that productivity can never slow down, not for a holiday, not for illness, not for a school play, not for a parent teacher meeting, not even for maternity leave. We believe that keeping a roof over a child's head, and their belly full of food is the immediate function we must serve. We believe in sacrificing our own lives and hope replacing the lessons we could share with a group think provider will stand as a good enough replacement for all the little dreams and ideas we would want to instill but never will because we are at work trying to give them everything we never had for ourselves. Yes I wonder what did happen to family values I wonder why Americans must work so much for so little and still have no time left to be with family. Family Values have been replaced with Productivity and Over Priced Commodities so the one percent can spend all the time they ever need with their own children living in the lap of luxury while stealing us awy from our and ensuring that our children will be faced with even more struggle as the one percent fixes the market for themselves and their chikdren and their children's children.

If you even believed for one second that what you just posted was true, then what the hell reason is there for you or anyone else here to attempt to do anything at all? It would be an insane waste of time to try to change the mentality of an entire country that all believes the same things.

You may choose to be as hysterical and incorrect as you want to be, but don't you dare claim to speak for me or anyone else when you do it. None of the things you claim that "we" believe represents anything even close to my beliefs or those of any of my friends, neighbors or family members. And we are all Americans.

Either you are mentally disturbed or you arrogant enough to believe that every single person in this country is living, experiencing the exact same things that you are and are just in denial or blind.

I got news for you sister, there are many, MANY people in this country who make ends meet, work one job (often with benefits), get time off for illnesses and maternity leave (often WITH pay) put a roof over their kids' heads, food in their stomachs, and play with them, teach them, do homework with them, vacation with them, and even spend time with them EVERY DAY. These same people often teach their children how to live within their means and save some and build a life not dependent on credit.

Now maybe, none of these alien Americans live near you, or you haven't traveled enough to meet any of them, but they do exist and all of them would find your rantings peculiar.

You're right some people have it really really good and are so arrogant as to believe they are the norm and that they are representative of 99 percent of America ...when they in fact are a very very small percent. But if it's going good for you why should you worry... your fellow Americans aren't your problem they're just your neighbors and children's classmates, and the homeless guy in the gutter. You seem awfully angry for someone who is enjoying life so much...hmmm what are you doing here I wonder ranting at one of the lesser endowed, when you could be spending time your kids?

I never said I have it really, really good. Stop attempting to put words in my mouth or pretend you know what I think or feel. It's the epitome of arrogance and arrogant people make me angry. Not much else does. And I'm not the one ranting about not spending time with my kids. You were. Yet here you are...

I've sacrificed some things for other things. It's called making choices. I have the free will to do that. We made purposeful choices on where we would live and work and raise our kids so that we could be the kind of family we wanted to be. That meant smaller city, more rural living, less fancy this or that because more play hours meant less work hours, and thus less pay. It means no designer brands or allowing our kids to demand or expect things that don't really matter in order to pay for and make time for the things that do matter.

You and I both get the same 24 hours in every day and the same 365 days in a year. You and I both decide every single day where and what we spend our time on.

I don't care where someone lives, it's easy to get the idea that the rest of the world is exactly like you are. It's not.

And big cities are just as much places where the women are single and raising kids alone as places where women have men by the balls. Nothing about either category of women or men is flattering. It doesn't take "manliness" to be successful. So I disagree with you there.

People give their liberties away all the time, sometimes on purpose, sometimes without realizing it. It's easy to be angry about it when you can pin the blame on someone else, it's a lot harder when you find out it's your own fault.

Oh, little Wonder Bread sales rep..........you know damn well that you deliver nothing but provocative one liners designed for emotional chaos. The fatal mistake is that the Elf ID is a trolling ID which make this all rather staged.

Gf your perception is so narrow and out of whack that you've begun slamming members of you own protest group; a few of my opinions differ slightly from yours and blammo you've cast me down with the likes of these idiots- the wonder bread twins...like I said the horse shoe loops around and the extremists end up on the same end it's truly pissing me off I've spent a lot of freakin time on here expending energy I don't have because I'm a true believer in this movement...say what you will about me...I'll never go back to the matrix

ps mr vapors, thanks to this economy ...and lack of upward mobility; I don't have kids because I can't afford enough food for myself let alone a child, so I'm choosing to spend time what little spare time for something I believe in what's your exuse? Really like shoving peoples's faces in the dirt because they can't qualify for bank loans to go to college and the cost of monopolistic commodities and education is so high that one can not save and still make the over priced rent....? and you don't got to lie I know you're jealous of my husband's muscles and yes most secretaries aren't widely known to afford worlwide tours it's hard enough to pay for gas to commute to work narcissistic world class ass wipe ... yeah your travels have really widened your scope

I am occupy at what point did you hear me profess to be tea party? Whoo hoo whoo hoo go read other posts I've only ever used one log on also who has time for covert blogging missions I work ft...and why would I bother what purpose does that serve?

Unless someone stole my log in I never said s much ...My husband and I are from different political poles and we meet in the middle at Occupy I am leftish he is rightish and we are both Occupy (convinced now you're a paid agendist)

Millions and millions of poor people have children and manage to feed them just fine. And if you can't afford to feed yourself, you'd be dead. You certainly wouldn't have a computer and internet service. Have you always been an exaggerator who blames other people for everything in your life or is this a more recent behavior pattern?

Oh, and I didn't go to college, and neither did my husband. But in this economy, my daughter graduated this year after putting herself through college without bank loans, with zero financial help from us and paid her own rent, car payment, and traveled while doing it. Oh...and she worked two secretarial jobs the entire time. Probably because she lives out here in the magical land where little blue fairies poop money and birth rainbows.

The funniest part of this to me is I'm vehemently fighting on behalf of occupy against opposers....if you don't see that our government is a three headed dragon with the corporate head in the lead and working people and citizenry at the tail then you just haven't woken up yet...left or right it's all fuck the working people (and you may be part of the Corporatist agenda)

Yeah with food stamps I don't expect other people to feed my unborn children. Like you said we make choices and I choose not rely on corporate news...so I eat one meal a day so I can stay informed sad that all two internet "providers" charge such a huge chunk but you think that's just fine...did your daughter get financial aid then because there is no way in hell I could work two full time jobs during the day and afford rent and car and still have time to attend or afford a BA degree program most of which are during daytime hours and you don't get to pick the times....so unless I move to a land where I can freeze time ..I guess I could pop out a kid and qualify for some aid but I don't expect other people to pay for my school and unborn child. So your story isn't meshing, what are you leaving out? And yes people like you are directly responsible for this system being so shitty because you lick it up you lick up all that shit and grin back at us with your brown noses in the air like you're so awesome because you love the taste of servitude and a mediocre life and then hate people who don't want to kiss those shit covered hypocritical lips and sorry...we'll never get used to the taste. Because I believe in honesty above all else, it's perpetuated lies (or ommissions) that ruin our country. You'd be amazed at how many people I know who proclaim to be so independently smart and wealthy and who oppose this movement the most got where they are with goverment aid. In fact they hate me so much for being angry at having to work so hard so I can watch them get a head not by their own bootstraps but by mine...then they claim that they think it's all fine because they don't believe in subsidies so they're going to abuse them and aka steal from society as much as they can. I believe subsidies and tax breaks should be for the elderly and destitute not for some middle aged middle income mama who wants to go back to school after she's bored of rennovating her kitchen and knows it's easier to take advantage of the system than to try to change it or for my employers so they can turn around and say they can't affird to pay me more even while they drive up my taxes with all their write offs and government hand outs

I didn't say my daughter worked two "full time" jobs while she went to school so your entire rant about freezing time was useless. Both of her employers were flexible with her while she attended school. She also had a scholarship that paid for her tuition and books. One of her employers would have reimbursed her for any courses she took that applied to her job with them if she had needed it.

I don't know where you live, but I have all kinds of options for internet service where I live. We use a local ISP and it costs us $40 a month.

I don't get subsidies, nor would I qualify for any. But I'm certainly not rich either. I also pay whatever taxes I owe, but I'm sure not going to pay more than I owe. Do you?

You sure like to pretend to know a lot about people you've never met. And you like to pretend that there are only two kinds of people out here, those who agree with you who are poor and sad and bitter and oppressed, and those who disagree with you who are rich and happy and oppressed but oblivious. All the people you know hon, are not all the people there is to know. It's you who is perpetuating lies.

But if it makes you feel better to believe that you are completely powerless to change your life and that it's all someone else's fault, I suspect you'll continue to do so.

Same goes for you please see above post. I am so astounded at the fact you just told me that my man is not keeping me in check by " allowing "me my own opinions that is truly fucked up...yes men that give their woman a leash are gay that's a sane opinion and one for the grim days before sufferage. My working class and sensitive husband has labored more in a week than any man on WS has in a lifetime and has the hot body to show for it. Neither he nor I defines success by our wallets we define it by having time to spend with family and by being able to give to others. We define it by not allowing Wall Street power to control our success or that of our fellow Americans. Also progress has spread intelligent opinionated and outspoken women are no longer restricted to the confines of the big city.

Unless your "man" is a metropolitan girly boy" who handed his balls to you and lets you do all the talking and deciding and choosing, then she wasn't referring to you was she? She didn't say men who give their woman "a leash"-you did. YOU are the one using dog/pet references here. And then you had to throw in a reference to his "hot body" as if muscles or fitness defines manliness. Do you even stop and listen to yourself?

Wall Street doesn't control you or your success unless you cater to Wall Street. Intelligent, opinionated, and outspoken men AND women who don't like the lives they are "forced" to live due to the confines/monopolies of the big city get the hell out of it and find a place where they can succeed while helping those around them succeed too.

Bwhaaa hhaaa hhaaa he he ....do you have a special compass that leads you to a world where WS doesn't rule the land or market and little blue elves and fairies alchemize fortunes from their feces, grow opportunities on trees they grew themselves out of their asses, and conjure raibows that lead to pots of gold without any rain but merely with the power of positive thinking, ..is that magical Smurf Village a place only you can see by chance or can I go there too if I just work harder?

What a disturbed, bitter, angry, irrational little person you are. Good luck getting people to "unite' with you on anything.

I suspect that even if there was such a place, you'd never get to see it because your own pride wouldn't let you journey that far outside of your self pity and fear based cocoon. You keep telling yourself that WS controls everyone and everything if it makes you feel better. I'll be out here having a completely different life experience.

It's called opening to the truth if you actually understood the philosophy you hint at you'd stop living such a self involved existence and living in blissful ignorance... Enjoy your write offs I'm sure a lot of us work hard to pay for your very different experience.

You aren't open to any truth except the one you've created for yourself. You have no idea whether I live a self involved existence or not. You have no idea if I'm blissfully ignorant or not. You don't bother to ask any questions or learn anything-you just assume you know everything about everyone and stomp about like a child in your blissful arrogance.

If you're as broke as you claim to be hon, then I can promise you that this household pays MORE for your sad, bitter experience than you pay towards mine.

I'm done stooping not very fun to me: this is why I'm really here below links....I won't lie i'd like my own enjoyment on the planet (is part of it) but I see a world out here that you and people like you choose not to see
I can't choose to ignore suffering for my own happy "experience" leaving out the rest of the planet and pretending they're just whiners

every person is affected by every other person we're always part of and contributing to someone else's experience whether we realize it or not...like our interaction here, none of us exists in a vacuum...and people do have the ability to control or effect someone else's life so which way will you do it? Up or down ?

Yep. There's been a helluva growth in the administrative arm of public schools. Most schools have a 1:1 parity on administrators (paper pushers) to teachers and schools have become a jobs program. Time to cut out the admin staff.

With the highly profitable, yet cheaply built cash register constantly breaking down, perhaps the use of the cell phone is to produce the numbers necessary to balance the register after the place closes. Or maybe she was going to give the number for a proper tip, you never mentioned it, cheap skate.